by Alan Davies
Only ten feet away were the main rear doors for the Co-op. Had we crashed through those, we might have enjoyed some Italian Job-style Mini driving down the aisles, with some Blues Brothers-style dialogue about the product lines on offer. But we hadn’t. This was real life and now I had to get the Mini home to show my dad. I climbed into my friend’s car while the others tied it to the Mini with a tow-rope. Wally sat in the Mini’s driving seat. He tried to bump-start the broken car while being towed, which led to some slackening and tightening of the tow-rope that nearly detached the rear of the Herald.
My dad lost his no-claims bonus as I was on his insurance.
‘I suppose you were doing a “racing turn”, were you?’
He was cross, so as per our established routine, I lied, making him crosser:
‘No I wasn’t. I got my foot caught under the brake pedal.’
‘But people have been driving these cars for over twenty years! I’ve never heard of anything like that!’
‘It got stuck between the pedals, they’re really close together.’
I was convincing myself now. It was no use for my dad. I would not admit responsibility. I’d never experienced any reward for confessing to errors, the ensuing rage didn’t diminish, so I had long since developed a personality defect, in that I had no capacity for acknowledging when I was in the wrong. At best, diffidence, at worst, hostility, would come before any contrition. In fact, death before contrition!
Once I’d asked if I could have Shredded Wheat instead of my normal cereal because they were giving away some collectable item. I’d never eaten it before and quickly established that, though it is marketed as such, it is not food. I climbed over the fence into next door’s sideway and hid the box in the back of their shed. Some time later my dad said Mr Mendoza from next door had been round with a box of Shredded Wheat, missing one piece. Backed into a corner with no other culprit possible, but safe in the knowledge that there were no witnesses, I denied all knowledge. Brazen.
The Mini went off to be repaired and I had to rebook my test, which I then failed anyway. After reversing round a corner, I went to pull away and carried on backwards. I hadn’t changed gear. If you’re going to fail, fail big. Always ready with an excuse, I blamed the presence of lots of school children, causing me to wait for ages. I didn’t make the connection that therefore, in my world, children crossing the road was a legitimate excuse for me to drive away in the wrong direction and that, despite this flaw, I believed I was not unfit for a licence.
I passed second time and prepared tapes for the car. By now I had The Harder They Come soundtrack, which featured Desmond Dekker, Toots and the Maytals and Jimmy Cliff’s ‘Many Rivers to Cross’. His was the most amazing voice in all of reggae. I was accumulating secondhand albums from a little shop inside Wanstead tube station, where I found LPs by Culture, who, alongside Gregory Isaacs, were my favourites now.
I had piles of Motown and still listened to The Style Council (whose Long Hot Summer kept me and three mates happy for all of our five-day summer trip to Devon) but the only other band I really liked was The Fun Boy Three, who I’d seen at the Hammersmith Palais in February when their second album, Waiting, was out and they were in the charts with ‘Tunnel of Love’.
It wasn’t a great year for music, other than New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ and Heaven 17’s ‘Temptation’ and despite The Tube showing plenty of live acts (including Madonna singing ‘Holiday’). The Tube was very popular. Jools Holland was amusing, Paula Yates was highly fanciable and they had Mark Miwurdz on every week who, as Mark Hurst, became one of the best comedians in the country. Everyone left the pub early the night Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video was on television but somehow, inexplicably, I loved reggae, and this without an accompanying interest in marijuana.
One night ten of us were going to a party in Toot Hill, which is some way from Loughton along pitch black lanes. We had two cars but I was reluctant to take more than four in my Mini, having just passed my test. Wally was driving his dad’s small Fiat saloon. He drove at breakneck speed everywhere with all the calmness of someone fleeing a fire. One time several of us were standing outside the Chariot chip shop on the High Road when Wally’s Fiat swung in to the slip road in front of the shops. He’d seen a liaison opportunity and hurtled towards us before slamming into reverse and thrusting back into a parking space. Leaping out, he strode towards us. I was all for not letting on but someone kinder than me told him:
‘You’ve left the handbrake off.’
‘What?’ he said, before turning to see his dad’s car rolling towards its neighbour. Trying to stop it with his hands he screamed:
‘It’s not funny! Help me!’
‘You can manage,’ said someone else.
Wally offered to take six to Toot Hill in his dad’s car. He was a bit miffed. I should have taken five but the Mini was tiny. We set off with me leading as my passengers knew the way. Wally drove inches from my rear bumper. Eventually, lost, we pulled over. Wally walked down to us and spoke to my passenger.
‘I could have taken him on every corner,’ he muttered.
He offered to lead as one of his passengers knew the way from there and sped off. The Mini 1275GT was a better cornering car than the Fiat, but we were skidding to keep up. Memories of friends of mine, who’d recently rolled a Triumph Herald, rendering one of them impotent, having broken his pelvis, were fresh in my mind.
I followed Wally’s rear lights. It was becoming difficult to keep up. Screeching round a left-hand bend, I saw the brake lights of the Fiat moving up and down. I realized they had left the road and that I probably shouldn’t follow. The Fiat jumped up in the air, with its six occupants, including three fifteen-year-old girls, bouncing around inside. It came to rest on top of a hedge with all four wheels spinning in the air. The passengers were unharmed and climbed down tentatively. They had ploughed through a front garden and narrowly missed a house, the owners of which came out to see what had happened. The huge tree in their garden had lost some of its bark, stripped off by the Fiat. Wally remained in the driver’s seat, furiously revving the engine with the rear wheels spinning in mid-air.
Not all the teenagers I knew drove fast. I did though, as I became more confident and as a consequence was regularly breathalysed by keen policemen, who were eager to use their new equipment to catch offenders under the recently enhanced drink–drive laws. I wasn’t going fast because I’d been drinking. I just liked it. The melodious, ever-present reggae didn’t slow me.
A friend of mine suggested swapping the Mini’s front tyres over to even up wear. He knew nothing about cars but had a confident manner so we swapped them. Driving along the next day, my girlfriend, Justine, said she could hear a banging. I listened and began to speculate authoritatively, for her benefit, on what it might be, although I had no idea. I didn’t consider pulling over and having a look. Justine mentioned it was getting louder. I dropped her off at her house in Chingford and headed back to Loughton. Pulling out on to Ranger’s Road the nearside front wheel came off and bounced away in the darkness on to Chingford Plain, leaving the Mini sliding on its axle.
I had no spare wheel as the 1275GT had special Denovo tyres that ran flat when punctured. Recovering the wheel, I found the holes for the wheel nuts had ripped open. I found a telephone box and rang the AA.
Two hours later, a vehicle normally dispatched to tow home articulated lorries arrived. It had more flashing disco lights than Top of the Pops. Spinning lights, pulsating lights, blazing white spotlights at the front that illuminated the forest.
Those lights made a mockery of my dad’s lined curtains as we pulled up outside the house. He stared down from his bedroom window in disbelief.
On this occasion I confessed the truth because I could hear my stepmum sticking up for me:
‘It’s just bad luck, it could happen to anyone.’
No, it could only happen to an idiot who needlessly changes his wheels and doesn’t tighten the nuts up enough. That day w
as a missed opportunity to introduce my dad to the music of Jimmy Cliff, particularly his famous track, ‘Better Days are Coming’.
1984
James Dean
I was introduced to James Dean by Louise Burgess. Louise told me that Dean was:
‘The best-looking man there has ever been.’
‘Really?’ I said.
‘Oah…’ she gasped.
She clearly meant it. I’d never heard of this guy. The most beautiful man in the world? Ever? How had I missed this?
Dean, it turned out, had died in a car accident in 1955 and had only made three films, East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant. I’d never seen any of these, though I’d vaguely heard of that Rebel one, or maybe it was just the phrase I’d heard before, which surely wasn’t coined for the movie.
If I could have metamorphosed into a Dean look-a-like at that moment I would have done so, because I fancied Louise something rotten. I had completely queered the pitch with her though, by spending much of 1983 in the throes of a crush on her younger sister Melanie. It was calling round after Mel that allowed me to meet Lou in the first place. One summer afternoon this older girl appeared and began dancing to whichever song was playing at that moment. ‘Come on!’ she said, as the teenage boys sitting round gazed at her skin-tight white shorts and bare legs. Who was this? As if Mel and her friends weren’t enough, now there was a new, virtually adult, vision of female excellence.
Mel was a year younger than me, and Lou a year older. It seemed impossible to have a girlfriend who was older than you. To ask an older girl out was to risk humiliating, mocking rejection. So when I did chat to Lou, I’d be trying to persuade her to persuade Mel to give me a go.
I’d known Mel for years as we went to the same primary school. The Burgess household, at times, resembled a drop-in centre for teenagers. Mel and Lou had an older sister who offered haircuts to their friends and a nice line in droll remarks, their mum appeared to enjoy the noise of a busy house, and Mr Burgess sat wearily in the front room while the noise of three competing stereos and four competing conversations rang cacophonously around him day and night.
Many Sunday nights were spent with Mel listening to Tommy Boyd’s phone-ins on LBC. In common with most households then, there was one TV, in the front room. Out the back at the Burgesses’ there was a room, with a hatch through to the kitchen, where you could listen to the quirky ranters who would phone LBC, which had some very good presenters at the time. Brian Hayes was on in the morning and he, rather than encourage dimwitted, ill-mannered bigotry, would give it very short shrift. They weren’t grateful to you just for calling, they wanted intelligent conversation. Tommy Boyd, who was on late in the evening, had a lighter show which was often hilarious. Mel found almost every caller funny and kept a stream of her own chat going to me and to Tommy on the radio.
At the end of the show though, I’d have to go home, unrequited.
Sitting alone with Lou in the small hours one night, again talking about Mel, she turned to me and said, somewhat exasperatedly:
‘What about me, Alan? Don’t you fancy me?’
I looked at her in shock: ‘Of course I fancy you, Lou, everyone fancies you.’
‘Oh right, of course,’ she scoffed. ‘You’re just saying that now.’
‘I’m not!’
‘It’s too late.’
‘No,’ I spluttered. I really did splutter (‘To utter incoherently with spitting sounds’ – Collins Gem) which I had previously thought only happened to characters in Cheeky comic.
‘I do fancy you.’
‘You can’t fancy us both.’
‘I fancy you more.’
This was true, Lou was the most attractive girl I’d ever spoken to. Of course, I’d seen the Barnett sisters from Woodford County High and tried hard to spy on them sun-bathing in their back garden. I’d watched Jane Smart, the most beautiful girl in the sixth form, from the top of the bus every day as she drifted away to her home, but these were distant untouchables. Lou actually talked to me, and laughed with me, and had apparently had enough of her 21-year-old boyfriend with the Golf GTI who seemed impossible to compete with, what with his being twenty-one and having a Golf GTI.
I implored her to forget all that I’d said about Mel, who was patently never going to want me, had a crush on my best mate, and only came with me to Arsenal sometimes because she quite fancied Charlie Nicholas. Had I even thought it possible that Lou would consent to even five seconds of closer proximity, I’d have been overjoyed. She wasn’t having it.
So they were like sisters to me, the Burgess sisters, and I remained one of their many surrogate brothers, and Mel laughed at Tommy Boyd and Lou told me about James Dean.
James Dean became My Favourite Icon and the first one I’d adopted from another era. Dead over a decade before I was born, his life and times were so remote from ’80s Essex as to be recognizable only by virtue of both periods being populated by humans.
There was something about Dean though, that instantly chimed with me at seventeen. His three films were run on television at this time and I videotaped all of them. Watching him was easy, he compelled you to look at him even though he often seemed to do little or nothing; everyone else almost shrank in his presence, so much did he dominate the screen. Even when he stood or sat still, the sense of the churning within him was palpable.
Dean’s torment, expressed vividly in those three characters he played on film, was real. He had lost his mother to breast cancer when she was twenty-nine and he was eight. His father, who had sold his car to pay for his wife’s last operation, couldn’t cope with his job and caring for James, so he sent him to live with his sister and her husband.
The loss of his mother was a mortal blow. She had nurtured him unconventionally, giving him the middle name Byron, apparently after the poet, and taking him to singing and dancing lessons, which set him apart from other boys. He was different, raised to be artistic and told he was special, perhaps better than his peers. Then she went away. He was left by her and left different.
His father sent him away and gradually his sadness, grief and despair hardened into an anger, an ‘I’ll show you’ rage that pushed through him, surfacing from within like emotional floodwater whenever he was required to portray emotion for the camera.
A child’s emotional development can be hindered, or even halted, by significant trauma, such as bereavement. In the improvised opening scene of Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean appears to draw on child-like feelings as he portrays a young man drunk in a gutter. Dennis Hopper, who was in the cast, is quoted in David Dalton’s biography of Dean (which I read in 1984):
‘I have a script in my hand that says this guy’s in the gutter, drunk, and he gets taken to the police station and is angry about it. Well, first of all, the guy is in the street playing with a toy monkey? And doing baby things – trying to curl up, to keep warm… Then he’s searched, and this angry drunk guy is suddenly ticklish? Where did that come from? It came from genius.’
It reads like a description of the arrest of a lost eight-year-old boy. Dean would exhibit the vulnerability of the bereaved child in all his roles.
Cal Trask’s desperation to please his father in East of Eden is as heart-rending to watch as is his lonely, sad search for his mother. John Steinbeck’s compelling novel is too huge to be committed to film in two hours so a piece of the book was chosen that encapsulated the trauma of a family with no love at its heart and rage there instead. James Dean’s performance, or rather his controlled exposure of the edges of his real pain, made him a movie star overnight.
He made two more films and then crashed his lightweight super-fast silver Porsche into a station wagon that did not see him coming as it turned left across the highway in front of him.
Four days after he died, Rebel Without a Cause was released, providing confirmation of the young talent that had been destroyed at twenty-four. At the heart of it all was James Dean’s anguished man-child with his lament to helpless paren
ts:
‘You’re tearing me apart!’
Even in Giant, his last film, in which he shared top billing with Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor, his boyish surliness is to the fore. He plays a ranch hand who refuses to sell a small piece of land he has been left, by the ranch-owner’s sister, and then strikes oil there. In confrontation with Hudson and Taylor’s characters, there remains the upset vengeance towards parent figures, as he smears an oil-stained palm on their white mansion.
When I first saw Dean’s photo I understood immediately what Louise was talking about. To resemble Dean would be perfect (the perils of being beautiful are lost on, or disbelieved by, those who aren’t).
The search for a red jacket similar to that worn by Dean as Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause was a long one. Despite the rails of ’50s Americana on sale at Camden market, the loose-fitting slightly pegged jeans and plaid shirts, and the flying jackets at appropriately sky-high prices, there were no red bomber jackets. I had the soundtrack to American Graffiti, which made for an authentic ’50s atmosphere in my Mini but I had no aspiration to replicate the ’50s. I just wanted to look like James Dean. To turn my own churning into an irresistible broodiness rather than a resistible moodiness.
It wasn’t feasible to wear a ten-gallon hat in Loughton under any circumstances so the silent pose, favoured by Dean on location on Giant, with the tipped Stetson over the eyes, was out. I didn’t wear glasses so the ‘actorly bespectacled artist in a polo-necked jumper’ look was out too. How was I to look like Dean?
I had youth, which was a start, I had no discernible muscle definition which was a similarity. The sight of James Dean shirtless in Rebel Without a Cause would, were it fifty years later, have led to calls to his agent from personal trainers angling to give him the gym body of the age. He was pale, hunched over and sorry-looking as befitted the scene.
I grew my hair a little like Dean and I tried to wear jeans like him and, fortunately, checked shirts, which were so readily and cheaply available in Camden, were fashionable, so I could pretend I was James Dean whilst not standing out too much.